Texture is becoming integral to design. It’s gone beyond being a trend — it’s now a simple and effective way to add depth to a website. Wielding the power of texture is a great responsibility. It increases the effectiveness of websites and is a quality tool in the arsenal of designers. It can guide the user’s eye and emphasize the importance of key elements.

However, texture has long been synonymous with “dirty” or “grungy” design. Its overuse can be seen throughout the world of music group websites and has left a bad taste in the mouths of designers. Due to its frequent misuse, its benefits have long been overlooked. Texture can bring a website together, but should not be the main focus.

Textures vs. Patterns

Before we get into textures in depth, let’s distinguish between patterns and textures. These words are often used synonymously. Patterns are typically small, repeating, tileable elements, whereas textures tend to be much bigger images that don’t repeat. Imagine a Venn diagram, with textures on the left and patterns on the right, with a little overlap in the middle. So, some textures are also patterns. Several of the tileable texture packs found on Tileables201 are good examples.

The Function Of Textures

We love texture on the Web for a multitude of reasons. Design decisions shouldn’t be made simply on the basis of, “Oh, well. It looks good.” Design should serve a purpose, and each decision about texture should be made by weighing the pros and cons. Let’s start by going over some of the key benefits.

Grabbing Attention With a Call to Action

Texture can highlight elements such as titles, headings, icons and buttons. It draws the eye to calls to action and main headings. This is perhaps the clearest way that the trend towards textures is catching on.

When used minimally, texture separates the content from the rest of the website. It guides the user’s eye directly to the intended element. It can be a great way to separate key branding elements.

You can grab attention in different ways, but two common ways can be easily demonstrated with branding: a textured logo against a clean background, and a clean logo against a textured background.

2Notice how Poco People3’s grunge logo is accentuated against the clean background.

Enhancing Information Architecture

Texture can be used to guide the eye. And like lines, boxes and contrast, it can be used to separate content into logical divisions. Using it effectively in conjunction with other methods is vital. The goal is not to abandon other methods of information architecture, but to enhance their effectiveness.

6By setting off the sliding banner with a texture, A Modern Eden7 highlights the content within.

See how you can use textures without violating best practices? High contrast and legibility are evident and work in tandem with the texture.

Above, each element is individually textured for a particular purpose. Sky’s Guide Service divides the content into logical sections, and the user sees where they start and end. Texture enhances the information architecture by creating logical content areas that help the user process the information accurately.

Also, the texture perfectly suits the style and topic of the website. All of the elements are custom-tailored to fit a logical theme, thus enhancing the website’s overall message.

Building an Atmosphere and Bolstering Identity

More and more, clients want website designs that do more than display their content in a user-friendly way. They want websites that enhance their identity and enable users to identify with the brand. Texture can be used to achieve this in many ways.

10While texture is plenteous on Deda11, it is gentle and never over-bearing.

Deidre “Deda” Bain does exactly this for her personal brand. Her use of texture helps to put a face — almost literally — to the service. Without the texture, the website would be rather bland and would lack the personality of its creator. With legibility and a proper information architecture, the design would still be nice, but that extra something would be missing.

Texture adds to the “intangibles” of Web design: that wow factor and sexiness of a memorable website.

Tips And General Advice

All of this is fine and dandy, but you’ll want to avoid common traps while refining certain techniques and modes of thought.

Maintain Legibility

Never (ever!) sacrifice legibility for texture. Many of us make this mistake, and will continue to for a while to come. Legibility on the Web is paramount in importance. If a user can’t even read the message, then what’s the point in composing it, let alone texturing it?

Avoid doing this to your type:

12Sometimes, we go a bit overboard. This poster13 shows what happens when you get too excited about texture.

Don’t Beat a Dead Horse

In print, texture is hard to overdo — depending on the genre, of course. On the Web, however, texture can be extremely distracting when used in “bulk.”

14On Hinder15’s website, legibility gets lost in the menu, and the texture is distracting. (And watch out for the auto-playing music.) Oops!

Practice Means Improvement

Experiment with your designs. Try new things. Apply textures in places where you wouldn’t normally put them. Use textures that you’ve never used before. You never know what you’ll discover until you try it.

If It Serves No Purpose, Take It Out

Refine your technique before using it on a client’s website. Always make sure that your use of texture is based on a sound plan, as would be the case with any website you create. If you can’t justify something that you’ve done as being an improvement, take it out.

There’s no point in overdoing texture. The entire purpose of the Web is to disseminate information. How can you accomplish this if your content is unreadable? Besides, subtlety and nuance are a better way to demonstrate mastery of a subject.

Consider the Effect You Are Trying to Achieve

As we know from experience, getting carried away with texture is all too easy. Keeping in mind the final effect you are trying to achieve is the best way to avoid this. If you want a subtle textured background, just do it and then move on to the next item on your list. Otherwise, you’ll never get it done.

Collect Resources So That You Don’t Have to Search Later

You can save a huge amount of time by downloading and archiving resources that seem useful to you. Keeping your files organized is a great back-up plan. Trust us: nothing is more frustrating than coming across the perfect brush pack and not being able to remember where you found it. Our list of brushes is long and diverse. We’ve been collecting the brushes over the years from websites such as deviantART3916 and Brusheezy17, from the freebie sections of various design blogs, and by making our own18.

Learn Masks

Learning to work with layer masks will save you a lot of time in the long run and will be a strong tool in your arsenal. Masks are also a fantastic way to non-destructively experiment with your designs. A lot of great tutorials are out there; a quick Google search led me to “Understanding Layer Masks in Photoshop19.”

Don’t Sacrifice Quality for Loading Time

There are plenty of interesting ways to keep textures from killing loading times. But don’t sacrifice the quality of the texture too much, because rather than appearing finished and professional, the website will look outdated right out of the gate. Repeating texture patterns are a good way to save on the loading times of backgrounds and larger elements.

Of course, we want to design with the Web’s inherent constraints in mind, but as Internet connection speeds rise globally, loading time shouldn’t be your primary concern. Nevertheless, use texture within reason: a website with a lot of textures will inevitably have a long loading time. A simple method to get around file size is to use repeating textures, especially for backgrounds. Tileables201 is a fantastic resource to get started. And we’re always learning about CSS Sprites21 and using Smush.it22 to further compress our files.

The difference in texture quality here is major. The texture on the left is compressed. The one on the right is, too, but not as much.

Choose Textures Logically

Lastly, and perhaps as important as maintaining legibility, choose textures that are logical for your design. If you’re building a website for a furniture store, then rusty textures wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense. Textures are meant to build identity, not to confuse the visitor, regardless of whether they look good. Usability should always take precedence.

Textures: A D.I.Y. Attitude

One of the many ways to get textures is to create them yourself. We are big proponents of this because it can save you time and give the exact result you’re looking for. And don’t worry: it’s not as difficult as it looks.

Snap Some Photos

The simplest method is to grab your trusty digital camera and snap shots of textures that are around you, especially ones that you’ve never considered to be “textures.” Unique textures can advance your style. For example, would you consider the top of a cake or bubbles in a sink as workable textures? They’re all around you.

23This photo from Lost and Taken2724 demonstrates that a distinctive photograph can be used for a special-purpose texture.

If you look around yourself, you will see plenty of grunge: worn-down buildings, concrete walls, rusted metal, tree bark, weathered wood. These are all fantastic specimens. In fact, a decent point-and-shoot camera is enough to start. We started shooting our own textures with an old Nikon Coolpix 420025, which worked flawlessly.

When you shoot, you could use full auto mode. But don’t use flash, because it will “flatten” the image and remove most of the detail in the texture, especially in close-up shots. Let the camera do the work, and always take multiple shots of a texture to get the best possible result. You can always rely on post-processing in your favorite image editor.

Scanners Work, Too

Another great tool is the good ol’ flatbed scanner. Old paper, cardboard, mouse pads (shout out to Trent Walton26 for this idea), paper bags, skin — the list of what you can scan goes on. Scan at a very high resolution, 600 to 1200 DPI, so that the texture is of high quality and can be adapted to any project, including large print pieces. High-resolution scans also allow you to isolate particular spots in an image to use as a texture.

Once you’re comfortable with that, you can start creating elements using traditional art techniques. For example, apply a bit of charcoal to some beautiful heavy paper, which could be the finishing touch for that grunge background you’ve been after. What about acrylic paint splatters to add depth to your UI? Or coffee stains on paper? The possibilities are endless!

Believe it or not, Photoshop’s somewhat gimmicky filters can also be used to create textures. Noise textures are a snap with the Noise filter. Playing with the values and levels of the filter, you can obtain results for a wide range of needs. There’s also the Texturize filter, although it’s rather gimmicky and rarely useful. Still, it could help you achieve part of the effect you’re going for.

A brief experiment with noise filters. Light noise is better, but make sure you can still see the effect.

If you want the texture to be seamless, then a uniform distribution is easier to work with. “Monochromatic” ensures that the texture has no color noise that could conflict with other colors in your design.

If you’re interested in learning the basic techniques of applying texture to elements, we’ve produced several videos to get you started. More advanced users may already know these techniques but might want to brush up on them anyway. Either way, we hope you find them useful.

A demonstration of using brushes, levels and layers to create texture.

A demonstration of using texture files, packs, levels and layers to create texture.

A combination of the two techniques above, with an overview of more advanced ideas.

Jon Savage and Simon Birky Hartmann are design professionals, collaboratively running a curious design studio named Studio Ace of Spade. Both having graduated from Goshen College, their skills cover four areas: Computer Science, Design, Business Information Systems, and Business. With backgrounds in project management, video games, and craft beers, they are building quite the interesting design business.
Check out their work on
Flickr, Dribbble, Behance, and Twitter.

Matt W

Judging from the examples, it almost always seems like the “right” way to do texture is to make it very subtle, (i.e. low opacity and lots of masking)…kind of a like a new haircut — make it seem like there’s something “different” about the content without people being able to tell what it is at first.

Hari shankar thakur

Climax Media

This really is a fantastic walk through for new designers or even the experienced designer that needs a textural refresher course! Making your own textures by snapping photos is always fun (and original).

Music auto-play on Hinder’s site? Not good lol. Auto play anything is not good. Give the user the right to choose.

If I could add a site to the list (one that we designed) check out http://www.zavida.com/ our creative team did a fantastic job playing with texture. Very organic :)

aldo

Maria

Rich

You’re looking at this from a design point of view, let’s not forget that textures can be a pain in the a*se to actually build too and can cause accessibility issues if you start restricting the behaviour of a page as it’s displayed in a browser because you don’t want the design to fall apart.

One cool thing about HS handling it, aside from size or asynchronous loading, is that it has the capability to be built out to be “smart”, e.g. with jQuery or some other tool it can read the current element background color and generate the appropriate level of noise, instead of either 1) a one-size-fits-all noise image or 2) multiple images

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Crystal Kelly

that noise generator looks awesome. i tried it but the demo would not work for me in FF. i’ll give it a try later or in a different browser. the idea of creating the noise with JS over top of a repeated background image would save on a lot of download time and keep the integrity of a site together.

James George

This is a great synopsis of textures in web design. Textures add depth and break up the monotony of plain solid colors. Imperfections are essential in making a scene, either in an image, or in a website, look more natural.

Shnooka

Matthew Schenker

Excellent article. I have been including textures in more of my sites, and always try to hit that balance of textures that are cool but also “make sense” and match the theme of the project.

As the article describes, I’ve happily discovered amazing textures out there in the world, and yes — my simple digital camera has been great foe this. I like this because Web design ends up being a reason to go out for a walk and be more aware of the analog world!

Here’s a quote that stands out for me:
“If you want a subtle textured background, just do it and then move on to the next item on your list. Otherwise, you’ll never get it done.”

Thank you for saying this. A few times, I’ve found myself spending so much time tweaking to get that texture “just right” and get behind in the larger project goals.

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Steven

Thanks for this pack, very good work. I am ponsitg texture packs collections on my blog so I’m gonna include yours when I write the next post. The download link will be to this post.bizarotrips’s latest post

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